Transcript
Speaker: Have you ever taken on a big reading project and needed a friend to get you through it? That's how we felt. I'm Hannah Weaver, Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
Speaker: and I'm Emma Glossen, Trinity Assistant Professor of French at Trinity College, Cambridge. And together we're the hosts of Proust Curious, a podcast in partnership with Public Books. Proust Curious is a podcast miniseries in which we, two friends who also happen to be literature scholars, take on what is sometimes posed as the ultimate reading project, Marcel Proust's à la recherche de temps perdu, translated as In Search of Lost Time.
Speaker: One of the best -known novels in French or perhaps in any language, this seven -volume account of a man's life from childhood to maturity evokes a whole world over thousands and thousands of pages. Reading Proust, we learn about France at the turn of the 20th century and class stratifications of Parisian society at the time. We learn about the politics and culture of the Van der Sijek and the pre -war period from the perspective of an intensely self -reflective narrator,
Speaker: whose life narrative is interwoven with comic social commentary and deeply engaging reflections on art, sexuality, love, grief and life itself. This work has inspired many subsequent writers and been the object of countless critical studies.
Speaker: For these reasons and many more, Marcel Proust's cultural touchstone is a source of enduring fascination and, let's face it, intimidation. But why is it so intimidating? Well, this is famously tough sledding. It's not just that each of the seven volumes is so long, though they are, it's also that the individual sentences are very long and complex, sometimes lasting entire pages.
Speaker: Yeah, and there is a certain amount of arcane philosophising and somewhat bizarre imagery. The rachash is also associated with elitism since it mostly represents a cultural and social elite, and it has been treated itself as a pinnacle of high culture in the Western tradition. But we're not really interested in the proof that it's there to be venerated or read as a form of self -improvement. We're reading this because we think it's fun, interesting, and worth being curious about.
Speaker: We're literature professors, but neither of us is a Proust specialist. So this is our attempt to take on this challenge at the outer limits of our expertise and have fun with it. We bring our critical and close reading skills to bear on the text without delving into the considerable academic tradition of Proust criticism.
Speaker: You could say that we're reading it so that you don't have to, but we hope that once you've listened you might want to go back to it or read all or part of this literary phenomenon. So whether you did or didn't take that Proust class in college, if it's a hate read for you, if you've always been meaning to get around to Proust, or if you've already read it and loved it, we wanted to share our curiosity about Proust with you and peak yours in return.
Speaker: Proust Curious is coming to your feed on September 16th. It's produced by Michael Goldsmith and in partnership with Public Books, an online magazine of ideas, arts, and scholarship. Join us next week as we search for lost time and remember things, Proust.
